00 agents

00 agents are elite special operatives of MI6 who have a discretionary 'Licence to Kill' in the field in order to complete their mission. Standard mandatory retirement age is 45 though various writers including Ian Fleming, Sebastian Faulks and John Gardner have contradicted this as a matter of Poetic License. Although Fleming only mentioned five 00 agents, others have been added over the years across various franchise media.

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00 agents

The following list is of the known members of this elite order who have been referenced in officially licenced James Bond fiction: novels, films, video games, and comic strips (not including impostors).

In the GoldenEyevideo game on the Silo mission briefing, Q mentions to 007 to "remember to treat the timed explosives with respect - you remember what happened to 004 in Beirut" - whether this is another agent or the same one as above is unknown.

Major character in GoldenEye. One of Bond's best friends, he betrayed MI6 and Her Majesty's Government by faking his death and then, years later, in aiding the theft of the secret Soviet satellite system, GoldenEye. His motive was avenging his parents, Lienz Cossacks, betrayed to the Communists by the British government after World War II. He also begrudged Bond's not allowing him time to escape unscathed from the Soviet chemical weapons factory they were to destroy in the mission shown in the teaser of GoldenEye. Portrayed by Sean Bean.

Until 2018, James Bond was the only agent known to have had the code number 007. During the timeframe of the You Only Live Twice novel, Bond was transferred into another branch and given the number 7777, suggesting there was no active 007 during that time frame. Bond was subsequently reinstated as 007 in the following book, The Man with the Golden Gun. In the John Gardner novels, 007 is the last remaining active 00-agent, the section itself having been dissolved by the 1980s; Raymond Benson later contradicted this in his novels.

In the films, agent 008 is mentioned briefly when M threatens to replace Bond on an assignment, e.g. Goldfinger and The Living Daylights[1]. The James Bond 007 role playing game released in the 1980s suggests 008 is a woman.

In the novel Goldfinger, Bond thinks to himself that 008 would likely avenge Bond by killing Goldfinger. As Bond thinks this, he ruminates that 008 is "a good man, more careful than Bond." In the novel Moonraker, 008 (called "Bill" by Bond) is mentioned as being on recuperative leave after returning from a mission behind the Iron Curtain.

In the 1998 video game James Bond 007 for the Nintendo Game Boy, MI6 sends an unnamed agent 008 into Kurdistan to dismantle an arms smuggling ring. Soon thereafter, all contact was lost with 008. M makes a decision to send James Bond to investigate his whereabouts.

Although unmentioned on screen, the novelization of The World is Not Enough indicates that Bond is investigating 0012's death at the film's start. Nothing is known of 0012 except that a photograph of the agent shows the late 0012 to be a male with dark hair.

In Anthony Horowitz's 2015 James Bond continuation novel Trigger Mortis, an unnumbered 00 agent named Henry Fraser was reassigned to the Communications Department where he serves as Duty Officer, following paralysis from a gunshot wound to the spine.[2]

Additional 00-agents are glimpsed in the briefing scenes of Thunderball and The World Is Not Enough, but no additional information about them is provided. The latter film suggests that at least one 00-agent is a woman. There is fan speculation that suggests that M, being the head of MI6, is also 001, but this is not supported by any novel or film, and in fact Raymond Benson references a 001 in his novel, Doubleshot. Likewise, speculation that only nine 00-agents exist (001-009) is contradicted by Fleming himself in Moonraker, and likewise is contradicted by later writers.

Trivia

In addition to the above, the John Pearson novel James Bond: The Authorised Biography of 007 mentions "real life" 00 agents 002 (named Bill Fairbanks as per Man with the Golden Gun), 003 (badly injured in 1951), 008 (died in 1951), 009 (died in 1955 in Hungary), 0011 (died in 1951).

A former 00-agent candidate[3] nicknamed "GoldenEye" was featured in the video-game GoldenEye: Rogue Agent. He was shot in the right eye, and was dismissed by MI6 for "reckless brutality". He joined up with Auric Goldfinger against the shooter, Dr. Julius No, and eventually received a gold-hued, synthetic orb as a replacement for his right eye. After killing Goldfinger and Dr. No, he becomes Ernst Stavro Blofeld's bodyguard. Unlike other 00 agents listed here, it is difficult if not impossible to reconcile GoldenEye with the continuity of the films, comic strips, or novels.